Saturday, May 03, 2008

India's third-largest software company, Wipro, has initiated a second round of major business and executive changes within a few weeks.

A fortnight ago, the company announced the appointment of Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe as joint chief executive officers of Wipro Technologies, the company's global IT arm.

The move was said to have triggered discontent in some quarters of its senior management cadre, something the company has denied.

In the changes announced today, Wipro BPO head, T K Kurien (who reportedly wanted to quit) has been given charge of a new initiative, the scope and functions of which will be outlined later. According to sources, Kurien will report to Paranjpe for IT business, and for other initiatives he will report directly to Chairman Azim Premji.

Ashutosh Vaidya, who headed the computing business as vice-president of Wipro Infotech, will head Wipro BPO. He will work along with Kurien for a couple of months to ensure a smooth transition of responsibility. Vaidya will report to Vaswani and Paranjpe (secondary reporting).

Anand Sankaran will lead Wipro Infotech and reported Vaswani.

Following the resignation of P R Chandrasekar as president of the company's operations for Americas and Europe, Manoj Punja takes charge and will primarily report to Vaswani with secondary reporting to Girish Paranjpe.

Punja was previously vice-president of a vertical in Wipro Technologies that focuses on technology, media, transportation services, which has now been done away with.

Ayan Mukherjee and Hiroshi Aley will continue as heads of Europe, Japan and China geographies respectively.

The company has also reclassified some existing business units as strategic business units (SBUs).

They include the Manufacturing and Healthcare SBU to be headed by N S Bala, who was earlier senior VP in the Manufacturing Solutions Group.

The company plans to create a new SBU in Communications, Media and Technology, which will be headed by Sudip Nandy, who till now lead the Telecom and Product Engineering solutions business unit. Nandy will also report to Paranjpe.

Other SBUs planned are for Energy and Utilities and Financial Solutions which will also have separate business heads. A new strategic business unit for Retail, Transportation and Services has also been created as a part of the restructuring.

Product Engineering Services, which has also been reclassified as a service line, will be headed by V R Venkatesh, senior VP, Embedded Systems.